Cool or fool? Which of these news stories are fake?

April 1, 2012

OK, we admit it may not always be obvious, but KurzweilAI does not make up its news items. Really. Well … except this time. Your mission: figure out which of these stories are fake or real. (No fair Googling, or clicking “REVEAL” until you answer in Comments below!) — Ed.

1. Bonobos to communicate with humans via robots and the Internet

Using large touchscreen displays, Bonobos can communicate with humans by touching the appropriate lexigrams on those displays. What’s next? Bonobos will use iPads via the Internet to operate vending machines, open doors, watch movies, and even control robots to play chase games or squirt guests with a watergun. REVEAL

2. Google’s new Chrome Multitask Mode

Now you can browse the web with multiple cursors at the same time, so you can get more done, faster. Welcome to the ambinavigation revolution. REVEAL

3. Tacocopter to deliver tacos via drone helicopters

Here’s how it will work: you order tacos on your smartphone. The tacocopter finds you based on your phone’s GPS coordinates and delivers your tacos to wherever you’re standing. REVEAL

4. Driverless car takes blind man to Taco Bell

Speaking of: Morgan Hill, Calif. resident Steve Mahan, who is legally blind, was taken on a ride in Google’s self-driving Toyota Prius to Taco Bell, where he ordered tacos, was then driven to the dry cleaners, and then back home. REVEAL

5. Combat global warming by using genetic engineering to create little people

(Credit: TinyEntertainment.com)

What if we could engineer human beings to be more energy efficient? Size reduction could be one way to reduce a person’s ecological footprint. With preimplantation genetic diagnosis, already used in IVF settings in fertility clinics today, we could select which embryos to implant based on height. For instance if you reduce the average U.S. height by just 15cm, you could reduce body mass by 21% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding reduction in metabolic rates by some 15% to 18%, because less tissue means lower energy and nutrient needs. REVEAL

In a breakthrough based on the physics of quantum entangled states, scientists at the Soviet Institute for Quantum Engineering in Leningrad have for the first time successfully teleported a living specimen to the past with a new experimental technique dubbed “DDoS Bekenstein overflow.”

After the first (unpublished) experiments with macro-molecules and buckyballs, lab mouse Herbert George was successfully teleported in time to April 1, 2011. Two identical copies of the first time traveller, Herbert George Prime one year older than the original Herbert George, are now living together in the lab.

“It is often believed that the correlations between measurements on quantum entangled particles, whose outcome is always random, cannot be used to send signals between different space-time locations,” says team leader Prof. Baltabek Camran. “But the Bekenstein bound places an upper limit on the entropy S, or information I, that can be contained within a given finite region of space which has a finite amount of energy.”

“By initiating a teleport of a very large number of quantum copies of the same object, whose availability is ensured by the relative state formulation of quantum mechanics, to a target space-time region, we have triggered an anomalous overflow of the information-carrying capacity of the target, similar to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which has caused the original content of the target to be replaced by one of the copies teleported,” he says.